Raymond

Khoury

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Rasputin’s Shadow

"History, mystery, suspense, and action—Khoury knows the recipe for a good read." —Library Journal

“Just imagine what you could do … You could make people rush into any store you choose and buy anything you want them to. You could rig an election by manipulating people’s reactions to candidates, make them feel physically sick when one guy is on stage, then make them feel like they’re on cloud nine when your guy’s talking. Or you could be less subtle. Target your enemies, get them to turn on each each other. I mean, in the wrong hands … Jesus. Just imagine. Using it on a packed stadium, or, hell, inside Capital Hill. Senators and congressmen ripping each others’ throats out, live on C-Span …”

That’s only level one.
Level two is worse. A whole lot worse.

What is it?

It all starts on a cold, bleak day in 1916, a mining pit in Siberia turns into a bloodbath when its miners attack each other, savagely and ferociously. Minutes later, two men – a mysterious, horrified man of few words, and Grigory Rasputin, trusted confidant of the tsar – hit a detonator, blowing up the mine to conceal all evidence of the carnage.

In the present day, FBI agent Sean Reilly is tasked with a new, disturbing case. A Russian embassy attaché seems to have committed suicide by jumping out of a fourth-floor window in Queens. The apartment’s owners, a retired high school teacher and his wife, have gone missing, while a faceless killer, a rogue ex-KGB agent only known as “Koschey”–from an old Russian folk tale, meaning the deathless–is roaming New York City, leaving a trail of death in his wake.

Joined by Russian FSB agent Larisa Tchoumitcheva, Reilly’s investigation into the old man’s identity will lead to Korean and Russian mobsters and uncover a deadly search for a mysterious device whose origins reach back in time to the darkest days of the Cold War and to Imperial Russia and which, in the wrong hands, could have a devastating impact on our world.